Hello everyone,

During the last few months me and Andreas Farre have been doing our
master's thesis on a proof-of-concept compiler for Ruby. The idea is to
test how well a language like Ruby can be compiled to C--[1]. We are
nearing the end of our thesis and will be focusing most of our remaining
time towards writing our report. We would however like feedback on our
work from the Ruby community.

The compiler is written in Haskell, with a supporting runtime system
written in C and C--. It currently only supports x86 Linux.

Our compiler only supports a subset of Ruby, it is however enough
to write definitions of the fibonacci and factorial functions (included
in our repository under src/test/fac and src/test/fib) as well as some
other small programs. It's hard to write a complete list of what is
working and not at the moment since it tends to change rapidly. This
morning we didn't have support for modules and loops for example, but we
do now.

Our homepage[2] has a pre-compiled package with everything you need to
play with it. We appreciate all comments and suggestions. We will
probably be unable to implement any of them, but they will be
interesting material for our report.

Best wishes,
Anders Höckersten

[1] http://www.cminusminus.org
[2] http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00farre/thesis/